Creation Myths in the Ancient World
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2023
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Readers of the Bible are familiar with the stories of creation in Genesis 1-2, but far less familiar with similar tales from much earlier times in the world surrounding Israel.
In this special edition of the podcast Bart interviews Joseph Lam, an expert on the languages, religions, and cultures of the Ancient Near East (and Bart's colleague at UNC), who has just produced a Wondrium Course on the Creation Stories in the Ancient World. Among other things they talk about the reasons for thinking Genesis contains two very different creation stories (side by side) and how other older stories from Mesopotamia appear to have influenced the author(s) of Genesis.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:07.0 | The only show, where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar |
| 0:13.0 | uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. |
| 0:23.5 | I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. |
| 0:31.2 | I'd like to welcome you to the special edition of the Misquoting Jesus podcast with me, |
| 0:37.9 | Bart Erman. This week, I am not being interviewed by Megan. I'm doing the interviewing. |
| 0:44.7 | I've asked my colleague in Hebrew Bible and ancient near-eastern religions and cultures, |
| 0:53.2 | Joseph Lamb, to join me for a discussion about a topic that he's an expert on and that I'm not. |
| 0:59.7 | Joseph has recently done a lecture course, a 12 lecture course for One Dream, the great courses, on the creation stories of the ancient world. |
| 1:04.6 | And this is obviously of relevance to anybody who knows anything about the Bible, because |
| 1:10.1 | the Bible itself begins with a creation |
| 1:12.9 | story or two, as we'll see. Joseph has been around us here at Chapel Hill for, I guess, |
| 1:19.9 | about 12 years. He did a PhD at the University of Chicago in 2012 in the field of near-eastern languages and civilizations. |
| 1:31.1 | Those of you who follow the podcast closely will know that this, in fact, is the field that |
| 1:35.7 | Megan Lewis works in. |
| 1:37.8 | So Joseph knows all of these languages that Megan sometimes talks about and teaches a wide range of ancient languages from |
| 1:47.8 | Hebrew and Aramaic to things like Acadian and Ugaritic, which are very important languages |
| 1:54.9 | for anybody who wants to be an expert on ancient Hebrew philology. you have to know comparable languages from that region |
| 2:05.7 | and from antiquity. And so that is Joseph's, one of his major areas of expertise, is a Semitic |
| 2:12.6 | philology. He has published an important book, unrelated. |
| 2:18.5 | I mean, it's related. |
| 2:20.4 | Everything's related to this field. |
... |
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